


Three Times The Team Nearly Blew Their Cover (And One Time They Did That Themselves)

by andacus



Series: My Very Own Cliche Bingo [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Cliche, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Humor, My very own cliche bingo, Not Canon Compliant, Tropes, Undercover as a Couple, fluff that's not fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 04:09:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2010411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andacus/pseuds/andacus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three (of the many, many) times The Avengers didn't think before acting and caused Clint and Natasha more trouble than they needed.  And one time they almost blew their own cover (wink wink, nudge nudge).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Times The Team Nearly Blew Their Cover (And One Time They Did That Themselves)

**Author's Note:**

> Cliche Bingo?! Yes, please! My pal isis_uf and I decided it would be fun to build each other Cliche Bingo cards and we were right. So, I'm shooting for blackout and here's my first offering for the pretend couple square. Hope everyone likes it!

~One~

It starts with Tony, because of course it starts with Tony. 

They get back from wasting nearly six hours of the day on bad intel and they’re covered in soot and dirt and horse shit and Clint wants nothing more than to shower and change his clothes and maybe eat something that isn’t a granola bar or whatever soy-almond-berry-faux-granola crap that Natasha tried to feed him, but he can’t. He can’t do any of these things, because they slump through the door of the house and Tony Fucking Stark has his feet propped up on the coffee table.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Nat asks, looking like maybe she wants to stab him with her keys.

Tony scrunches his nose in distaste and looks around the room. “Saving you from the American Dream, apparently. Is this really what people want? McMansions and ugly, hand-me-down Beemers and babies? Because, I have to tell you, hand-me-down cars and babies have all the same -”

“What do you want?” Nat amends, cutting him off.

He holds up both hands, palms out. “The important thing is, no one got hurt. Let’s not change that, Xena.”

“We’re working, Tony.” Clint adds, imagining himself in the shower. It is glorious. And imaginary. Fuck his life.

“Yeah, I know, but we need you to come back. Or at least one of you. The balance is all off and we’re on the verge of killing each other. Okay, well, maybe they’re on the verge of killing me, but that’s semantics.”

“Out!” Natasha has crossed the room, kicked his feet off the coffee table and is dragging him out of the chair by the hair.

“Okay, okay!” He jerks away and she lets him. “That might be considered domestic abuse. Barton, does she beat you up, because you don’t have to stay in an abusive relationship.”

“She does and I like it. Jesus, Tony, spit it out! Why are you here?”

“I think I broke Rogers.”

They stare at him and he has the grace to at least look cowed. He’s probably faking it, but Clint allows points for effort.

“How?” Nat asks.

“Well, I may or may not have introduced him to the term donkey show. And the internet.” He waves a hand around. “One plus one...”

Clint snorts with the effort of holding in his reactionary laugh and when Natasha looks at him reproachfully, he shrugs and laughs harder. She’s about to chew Tony out and send him on his way, Clint can tell by the way she narrows her eyes, when the doorbell rings and they all freeze. He waves a hand at them, shooing them into the den and goes to open the door.

Of course, it’s the mark, a man they’re damn certain is using his dental practice to smuggle highly explosive, experimental, no good, very bad chemicals into the country. He’s not the big boss, but he’s not a victim either and Clint and Natasha are doing their best to climb that particular informational ladder, but so far he’s all they’ve got. And he sucks.

Kevin smiles at the man he thinks is Henry Lawler, every inch the creepy-taking-naked-photos-of-you-while-under-anesthesia dentist and Clint suppresses the urge to shudder. “What happened to you?” the mark asks.

“Helping my sister dig up her yard,” Clint said, adding a groan and a shrug, because if he had a sister whose yard needed digging up, he imagines he’d feel annoyed and obligated to do it. Kevin appears to agree and Clint smiles, friendly. “What can I do for you, neighbor?”

“Well, there’s a helicopter parked in my back field.” Kevin says a little awkwardly. “Larry said he thought he saw a guy get out and come over here...” He leaves off, letting the words trail out to nothing because he doesn’t really appear to know what to say after that. 

“Oh, that’s mine!” Tony comes barrelling out of the den, an old baseball cap pulled down over his head. Instead of the suit he had been wearing, he’s changed into a pair of dark blue coveralls (Where the hell did those come from?) and he has his phone pressed to his ear. “Sorry, sorry, you know how it is,” he says, shaking Kevin’s hand, as he forces his way into the doorway. “Yes, I’m sure it was a transmission chip light. Yes, I know the difference between a fuel indicator light and a... fuck you.” Tony switches back between the fake phone conversation and the bewildered man with dizzying speed. “No, not you, um, whoever you are. Thanks for the use of the field. And Mr... uh...”

“Lawler,” Clint supplies and he doesn’t even have to fake annoyed or confused.

“Right, Lawler. Clever. See ya.” And with that, he breezes down the porch and into the street, still yammering into the phone.

“You know that guy?” Kevin asks.

 _Unfortunately,_ Clint thinks and says, “Nope. He said he had some kind of mechanical issue and landed in the closest spot he saw. So weird.”

Kevin agrees that this is totally weird, but shrugs it off and heads home, to their great relief. Clint thinks their cover is blown, because come on, but somehow, miraculously, Kevin doesn’t suspect them of being anything more than a couple of married shmucks.

 

~Two~

Justin Treehorn is a creepy little fuck. 

They’re living in a thoroughly middle class apartment complex in Chicago, making like the locals, trying to gather enough information to prove this little mouth-breather is participating in the good old fashioned art of human trafficking (which he is). Their cover - a man and his heavily implied but never explicitly stated Russian mail-order bride - is working out very well, save for one thing.

They have Treehorny over for dinner and drinks and halfway through the second bottle of wine, he starts getting a little too friendly with Mrs. Lawler. This bothers Clint only in that it’s very unneighborly and kind of very rude. Really, there is no other reason. Certainly not jealously.

Seething, he glares at the way Justin’s hand brushes Natasha’s thigh. Natasha smirks.

Clint might have to punch the guy. Or better yet, let Natasha punch the guy. Someone was going to punch the guy before the op was over, that was for certain. He’s just imagined burying his elbow in Treehorn’s gut when the doorbell rings.

 _Motherfu…_ Clint takes a deep breath and does his best to look appropriately confused, because who would be coming by at nine o’clock at night? He suspects he already knows who. The series of e-mails and voicemails over the last twenty-four hours flashes through his mind and he prays to any god that might exist and have their ears on that the person on the other side of the door is not who he thinks it is.

Of course it’s who he thinks it is.

“Hello!” Thor booms, rendering any and all possibility of quietly getting rid of him moot. “I must speak with you.” He’s standing there in jeans and a t-shirt that does nothing to hide how enormous he is (though Clint supposes he should be glad he didn’t show up in the armor) looking like he might start asking nicely, which Clint knows is the kiss of death.

“I’m busy,” Clint hisses, trying to keep the guest in the other room from hearing at least his half of the conversation.

“It is important,” Thor insists, though it’s more subdued this time and his eyes start to soften and fuck. 

He looks so much like an overgrown, golden puppy that Clint can’t seem to turn him away, which is stupid, he knows. “Okay, buddy, look… We’re working, so you have to follow my lead, okay?”

Thor nods enthusiastically, brightening. “What details must I know?”

“Nat and I are married -”

“You have wed?! Congratulations!” And he storms into the living room, all boisterous excitement and hearty joy. 

He catches Natasha around the middle and swings her in an arc, hugging her tightly, before setting her back down.

Justin looks like maybe he’s going to bolt, but before he can escape the giant hug monster, said giant hug monster turns his attention on him. There is a very short moment of assessment and then Thor sticks out his hand.

“Hello, I am Peter,” Thor says, waiting for Justin to take his hand, which the smaller man does reluctantly.

“Peter is an old… colleague of mine,” Clint says. “He wasn’t due in until tomorrow, so this is quite the surprise.”

Thor’s laugh rumbles from his chest. “Sorry to surprise you. But I have business in town and I wanted to make sure I made time for my old friends.”

“What type of business?” Natasha asks, her accent thick and her tone a little wary.

Thor shoots Clint a tight look, sweeps his gaze across Justin and then back to Natasha. “Transporting some valuables for a client.”

Clint’s eyes would widen in shock if he wasn’t so good at keeping his face neutral. What the hell was Thor up to?

Justin smiles and says, “I imagine most people wouldn’t bother you, being built like you are.”

“No, not many,” Thor says, friendly.

“Peter was one of our best,” Clint adds. “Always got the shipments where they needed to be.”

Natasha giggles dumbly and gives Clint a sappy doe-eyed look. “Got me where I needed to be.”

“Elena!” He admonishes, as though she’s let some great thing slip. 

Justin’s creepy grin widens and he excuses himself, makes up a reason to leave, but they can see the wheels turning in his head, making the appropriate connections and Clint know he’ll give them the information they need in a matter of days. 

Once the door shuts behind Justin, Thor flops himself on the couch, ignoring the groan of springs and metal. “I require your assistance. Jane has declared she will not forgive me…”

With a long withering look at Nat, Clint sighs and sits down on the couch, intent on helping the thunder god with his lady problems, as you do, setting aside whatever questions he might have had about how the hell Thor just managed to move their timeline up a week. 

“Do not be so surprised,” Thor says. “I am the brother of the god of lies, after all.”

Natasha snorts a laugh and sits opposite them in a big ugly recliner. “Okay, what did you do this time and how can we get your tiny scientist to take you back?”

The story starts in the Bronze Age. Clint silently resolves never to offer to help with Thor’s personal life again.

 

~Three~

“Whose idea was this?” Clint hisses.

“Yours,” Natasha (Jenna, as she is currently known) replies, voice just as annoyed as his.

“Bullshit,” he says. “This was not my idea.”

Their current predicament is probably one of the very worst assignments Clint has had to suffer through. And that includes the time he nearly froze his balls off in Siberia hunting an insanely annoying (sexy), devious (brilliant), terrifying (talented), red-headed assassin. 

Said assassin hands him a baby and smiles sweetly.

Worst assignment ever.

It takes them three days to get the baby to stop crying and four more to figure out how to feed, clean, diaper, dress, soothe, and entertain the baby with even an iota of efficiency. So, a week into the assignment and they have gotten nowhere with the actual target (a woman with a daycare that is probably laundering terrorist gun money), have about three hours of sleep between them, and are sick and tired of this pretend normal life. 

Clint just wants to go back to the tower, to drilling arrows into bad guys, to Tony’s assortment of video games, to those muffins that Darcy makes, to his own bed, to understanding whatever it is that he and Natasha are… and there’s the other wrinkle. He and Nat have been on assignment so much lately, he’s forgetting who the real “them” are.

The baby squirms and he realizes he’s been standing in the garage, spacing out for the last several minutes. He shakes his head in an effort to clear it, smiles at the baby because babies like that sort of thing, and slowly starts for the door, where Natasha has already disappeared.

Just as he’s about to escape the Phoenix heat and delve into the cooler air of the house, his phone rings. _His_ phone. Cursing and shifting the baby over, Clint drags it out of his pocket. He rushes through the door, finding Nat unloading groceries in the kitchen, he gives her a pointed look and hands off the baby.

“Go,” he says into the phone.

“Big Green headed your way,” pants Stark. “He was in Tempe for a conference. Not sure what happened. I’m at least another hour and a half out.”

“And the rest of them?”

“Scrambling, they might beat me, but no exact timeline yet. Rogers was indisposed when the call came.”

Clint files that away for later and gets back to the issue at hand. “What else?”

“What makes you think there’s something else?”

Natasha, listening in next to him, rolls her eyes. “Bruce doesn’t travel alone for this very reason. Where’s his escort?”

Tony is silent for a long minute and then grumbles to himself, before saying, “Thor’s with him, but, well, he’s had to use some diversionary tactics.”

Oh, that sounds ominous. Clint decides he’s never going under cover again.

“Spit it out, Tony,” Nat says, losing patience, bouncing the antsy baby on her hip. Clint ignores the way her breasts also bounce with the movement.

“He told Hulk that you two had a baby and now he’s on his way to you to see the baby.”

Worst assignment ever!

The ground shakes and they hear the unmistakable roar of Hulk from somewhere down the road. Through the phone speaker they hear Tony say, “Ah there are the dulcet sounds of our favorite misunderstood beasty now.”

“Goodbye, Stark,” Clint says and ignores the other man’s protests.

“I’ll go out and head him off. See if I can’t reason with him. If it comes to it, you bring the baby out and we can play happy extended family meeting for a minute. If he doesn’t calm himself, I’ll use the darts.”

Nat shrugs and grumbles something in Russian that he doesn’t catch, because a huge green eye appears in the window and a growl rattles the walls.

Outside, Clint is met with chaos and mayhem. People are fleeing the neighborhood, packed into the cars, speeding away from the giant green guy in Clint’s flowerbeds. Some are huddled in their houses, watching through windows with wide eyes and open mouths. Thor stands in the middle of the street, watching. Clint spares a glance at the house next door where their target lives and notes that there is no one home. At least something is happening in their favor.

“Hey, buddy,” Clint says and smiles when a big green eye swivels to inspect him. 

“Baby?” Hulk asks. “Hawk and Widow have baby.”

“We’re just babysitting. It’s not our baby.”

Hulk makes a confused and maybe disgusted face. “Why sit on baby?”

“No, no, we’re taking care of the baby. Sitting _with_ the baby.”

He lets out a sort of growling snort of acceptance and then stares at Clint expectantly. Guess they’re not getting out of it without an introduction.

Natasha emerges a moment later, the kid still balanced on one hip. 

Hulk bends lower to inspect the baby and Thor steps closer, his hammer raised. Clint reaches inside the house for his bow.

“Name?”

“Sarah,” Natasha supplies.

“Pretty,” Hulk says and gently, so gently, holds an enormous finger in front of the baby. He does not touch her, instead patiently waits for her pudgy little hand to reach out and grab at his own pudgy hand. When she does, he snorts and huffs, turns and leaps down the street toward town. Thor shrugs and follows.

Later, they find a half squashed teddy bear on the doorstep and a note attached explaining that it was from Hulk.

 

~Plus One~

This was the very last time they were going to do this, Clint had vowed it to himself and to Natasha. Then he had vowed it to Fury and to Maria and to some random agent in the hall. The absolute last time. After this, no more pretend-a-couple, no more fake-a-family, no more!

And then the other shoe dropped.

“Whoa! Wait! Absolutely not!”

Natasha caught his eye and there was a weird look on her face that he couldn’t quite place, but honestly, he was too outraged by this new assignment that he didn’t investigate that look further.

“I am not doing this. _We_ are not doing this.”

“Clint, why don’t you wait for me in the cafeteria.” It wasn’t a question.

With a glare in her direction and one for Maria and Fury, too, Clint quietly and angrily left the room. Now that they were Avengers and SHIELD was just a little fledgling of a secret intelligence agency again, they had a lot more pull and lot more control over their work, not that that seemed to matter. Most of what they did for SHIELD was out of a misplaced sense of obligation, a desire to support the organization that supported them. But he was just about out of obligatory obedience.

Natasha found him grumbling into a cup of coffee a few minutes later. 

“You really have a way with people,” she said, taking the spot on the bench next to him.

“Tell me you got us out of it.”

“No, but it will be the last one.”

That was something he supposed.

Two days later, he is starting to think her deal is pretty rotten.

“I just feel like the support isn’t there,” Natasha says, not enough of Diana Gregory in her voice.

Clint’s Brian Gregory dissolves and he looks over, outraged. “I don’t support you?! I always, _always_ have your back. I can’t -”

“The emotional support,” she clarifies and that stops him cold.

Clint isn’t sure when exactly this stopped being a cover, but he thinks maybe it was about the time when she brought up Budapest without bringing up Budapest. 

“What are you even talking about?” He finally manages. “You’re like the rock of Gibraltar, you need to talk about feelings like Tony Stark needs more money.”

“See?” She asks, directing her comment to the man opposite them with the pad of paper and fifty degrees on the wall. “He just discounts what I’m saying because of his own preconceived notions.”

The man, a Dr Tilly (AKA AIM henchman and scientist), nods and jots something down on his pad. “Brian, why do you feel like she’s not expressing the truth about this?”

“Because I’ve never heard her say anything about it before and because she always doesn’t want to talk about this stuff.” Clint takes a breath. “Budapest was… look, I tried to talk to you about that, but you wouldn’t. You just brushed it off so I stepped back. What was I supposed to do, force the issue, ruin the partnership because of one… event?”

“Yes! You know I’m not good at this. You know how I am. You should have pushed me.” She pauses, looks away and then back at him. “You have to push me.”

He stares at her, surprised, confused, a little terrified. _You have to push me._

“What do you want, Na - Diana?”

She meets his eyes, uncertain, scared, and says, “I don’t know, but I trust you.”

He doesn’t have to lean very far to press his lips to hers, but she cuts the distance by meeting him in the middle. They crash together, hard, impatient, overdue. His hands come up to frame her face, a tender gesture in the middle of the desperate meeting of their mouths. God, it’s so good. It’s always so good.

She drags him closer, her hands in his hair, nails against the skin of his neck and he can’t help the growl that forces its way into his throat. She smiles against his lips.

“I love that. Do it again,” she says, dragging her nails across his scalp. He obliges her.

“Ah hem,” someone says and they break apart, remembering that they are in fact working.

“Uh, wow, Doc, you’re a miracle worker,” Clint says, standing, his hand locked in Natasha’s, pulling her up with him. “We’ll be back next week.”

They make it as far as the empty office down the hall before she’s dragged his pants down and her dress is in a bundled mess at her feet.

Okay, so, maybe they would be willing to do one more of these terrible assignments. Probably.


End file.
